Anna Karenina eBook

“I never said that; I said I did not sympathize
with this sudden passion.”

“How is it, though you boast of your straightforwardness,
you don’t tell the truth?”

“I never boast, and I never tell lies,”
he said slowly, restraining his rising anger.
“It’s a great pity if you can’t
respect...”

“Respect was invented to cover the empty place
where love should be. And if you don’t
love me any more, it would be better and more honest
to say so.”

“No, this is becoming unbearable!” cried
Vronsky, getting up from his chair; and stopping short,
facing her, he said, speaking deliberately: “What
do you try my patience for?” looking as though
he might have said much more, but was restraining himself.
“It has limits.”

“What do you mean by that?” she cried,
looking with terror at the undisguised hatred in his
whole face, and especially in his cruel, menacing
eyes.

“I mean to say...” he was beginning, but
he checked himself. “I must ask what it
is you want of me?”

“What can I want? All I can want is that
you should not desert me, as you think of doing,”
she said, understanding all he had not uttered.
“But that I don’t want; that’s secondary.
I want love, and there is none. So then all
is over.”

She turned towards the door.

“Stop! sto-op!” said Vronsky, with no
change in the gloomy lines of his brows, though he
held her by the hand. “What is it all
about? I said that we must put off going for
three days, and on that you told me I was lying, that
I was not an honorable man.”

“Yes, and I repeat that the man who reproaches
me with having sacrificed everything for me,”
she said, recalling the words of a still earlier quarrel,
“that he’s worse than a dishonorable man—­
he’s a heartless man.”

“Oh, there are limits to endurance!” he
cried, and hastily let go her hand.

“He hates me, that’s clear,” she
thought, and in silence, without looking round, she
walked with faltering steps out of the room.
“He loves another woman, that’s even clearer,”
she said to herself as she went into her own room.
“I want love, and there is none. So,
then, all is over.” She repeated the words
she had said, “and it must be ended.”

“But how?” she asked herself, and she
sat down in a low chair before the looking glass.

Thoughts of where she would go now, whether to the
aunt who had brought her up, to Dolly, or simply alone
abroad, and of what he was doing now alone
in his study; whether this was the final quarrel,
or whether reconciliation were still possible; and
of what all her old friends at Petersburg would say
of her now; and of how Alexey Alexandrovitch would
look at it, and many other ideas of what would happen
now after this rupture, came into her head; but she
did not give herself up to them with all her heart.
At the bottom of her heart was some obscure idea that
alone interested her, but she could not get clear